Circuits to control and drive brushless DC (BLDC) electric motors are known. As is also known, it may be desirable to know the position of the motor at startup. Conventional BLDC motor control techniques may employ BEMF (back emf) information for position estimation, however, BEMF information is not available at zero speed, for example, at motor startup. Another conventional startup technique is to drive the motor in open loop without position estimation (e.g., align and go for example), which may cause reverse rotation during startup. In addition, this technique may increase startup time if a relatively conservative startup profile is chosen, or, render motor startup unreliable if an aggressive startup profile is chosen. One known alternative technique for motor startup is referred to as Initial Position Detect (IPD), which is commonly used in hard disk drives, for example. Current is injected into six combinations of the three stator phases, where one out of the six combinations has the least inductance, which is indicative of the North pole of the rotor. However, conventional IPD techniques are noisy in practice due to the torque generated during current injection. In addition, accuracy may be relatively poor because six relatively close signals are compared.